Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam Read Online Free PDF Page A

those prices, it turned out it was impossible not to fall for his own sales pitch, and soon he was alternating between shooting coke and heroin. A couple of boneheaded stunts (a friend pulled a cap gun on another kid while they were all getting high, and the cops showed up) introduced him to the juvenile justice system, and his best friend today is the counselor that first got him into treatment. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, Mike went to rehab more times than he can remember. The last time, he stayed sober five and a half years—until a guy in their crew started eating Percocet and they all went down like a chain reaction, the counselor included. Now addicted to heroin, Mike started selling crack between midnight and 8 a.m. on a street corner in the Dominican part of North Philly, where he was known as White Boy Mike. A couple of times he came up short on the count: once he claimed the Philadelphia cops took him down on a bad bust, hoping he would fail to show up in court so they could bring him in on a bench warrant, and another time a pretty girl ripped him off for a dozen dime bags. The guys he was selling for confronted him with baseball bats and demanded that he bash the girl’s head in with a brick, but he couldn’t do it, so thirty of them administered the beating of his life. As he was just aboutto lose consciousness, one of the kids whose family laid claim to the corners reached in and dragged him out of there and drove him to the hospital. It taught him that you can be in the worst place in the world and still run into a decent person.
    He called a buddy in Boca Raton, Florida, and three days later he was sitting by the pool at a halfway house, because in Florida, even the halfway houses have swimming pools. There were women for the asking, even if women in halfway houses tend toward the incendiary, and a late-night Denny’s run for the Grand Slam breakfast effortlessly snagged him a manager-in-training job. Florida was looking more and more like paradise. When the training part looked like it was taking too long, he got a job with Coca-Cola as a service tech, and found he could fix anything. He could have retired there, except that he thought a minor back injury was going to be his ticket to Workman’s Comp Heaven. When that plan didn’t work out, he met a girl whose day job was spending her nights at raves selling ecstasy to stoner kids. With a background in sales, Mike was a natural. But getting back in the money also meant getting back in the drugs.
    Now strung out on a designer high for spoiled teenagers, something his program buddies would have been appalled by if they’d known, he took a boiler-room job selling gold coins in nearby Broward County. He was good at it, but he hated the work, which was repetitive and mind-numbing. Then somebody steered him to a similar operation that traded in foreign currency. All he had to do was get the fish on the line and then turn them over to somebody else to close. After he got the knack of it, it was like shooting them in a barrel.
    “Is this Joe? Joe Smith? Hey, Joe, this is Mike from such-and-such trading. This is a courtesy call, not a sales call. Just want to see if you’re actively involved in the markets. No? Okay, great. Like I said, this is not a sales call. What we do is broker in the foreign currency sector of the market. You know, basically the dollar versus the Japanese yen. Are you familiar with that? No? Well, no problem, I’m gonna send you out some information. You still at XYZ address? Great. Okay, just a few suitability questions. This isn’t for everybody; I want to make sure it suits you. If you see something you like, can you put in five, ten, twenty thousand? A million?”
    Mike was a quick study, and he prided himself on learning the business from the ground up. He fancied himself a broker. Problem was, there wasn’t any business. That was the whole business model: ask someone for his money, put it in your pocket. Mike